


Por Amor de la Tierra (For Love of the Earth)

by zempasuchil



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-07-07
Updated: 2008-07-07
Packaged: 2017-10-11 04:13:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/108251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zempasuchil/pseuds/zempasuchil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Caspian re-learns what it means to be King of Narnia.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Por Amor de la Tierra (For Love of the Earth)

_Nació del amor de la patria.  
I was born from love of country._

It was a long road, from the old scrolls and books that crackled and swarmed with dust, from his old nursery tales of valiant kings and queens and lions, to the heavy hand that rested on his shoulder and showed him what it was to be king.

Everything was different; it was not what he had been shown at all. To be king was not to look out the windows of a dark stone castle, or to hear the country through the lips of lords and royal messengers. It was not the power to have the country run by others. It was not the power to protect yourself from the touch of time and the world. To be king was not to have desires granted, and to be king was not to afford blindness.

His first lesson was when he saw that to be king, one must kill. To be king, Miraz killed; Caspian wanted his life but not the throne. Caspian fled.

It was a long road, from princedom to nothingness.

_Mi amor no es por la patria ni el ley -  
My love is neither for nation nor law -_

But when he escaped he saw as though through new eyes. To be king there was to be king within those walls, no further than the reach of the eye and ear. What was he to rise to, then, outside of castle walls? What kind of king could exist in Narnia?

Slowly he unlearned, like waking from dream. Slowly the caul slid from his eyes. Here were stories; he remembered and remembers still, the kings of old, the Kings and Queens of Narnia. The voices of the Narnians give him life, help him remember the old ways. How to look into the world, to labor for it, to be raised up by it. To be born of and beholden unto it.

_ \- sino la tierra.  
\- but the land._

He puts his hands in the earth and finds it moist, carries the weight of sweet loam in his palms for a moment, and knows.

_Hecho mi alma de aquel amor, nacido de la campana que soñaba en el día de la coronación.  
My soul made from that love, born of the bell that was sounding on the day of coronation._

His bones are shaken with the tolling of the bells of the castle. This castle, built by Telmarines on Narnian soil, now ruled by a Telmarine, raised to the throne by the Narnians. They know the cast of a king when they see one, and Caspian may doubt himself but he cannot doubt the Narnians' judgment.

And so, bones shaken, ears filled until his head held nothing but the sound of bells, Caspian finds himself suddenly aware of the mountains and their heavy slope, the pounding of the waves on the shore, the shearing wind over plains, the roots of the forest that hold the earth in place. He feels the bells resonate through all the body of the land as though it were his own body, the body of his mother and he were in the womb.

Caspian knows he stands here on stone, on a mountain top, knows the sea to his back and the land before him more intimately than ever before, and is a part of it, knows it holds him and that he holds it on his very shoulders. And the bells have stopped, and with the last vibrations Caspian feels the weight on him settle and readjust to something appropriate. Not worried anxiety or overwhelming guilt but a timeworn mantle of responsibility. Tradition of a thousand years, and more, yes more.

_Suena la bendición, de la tierra al rey.  
The benediction sounds, from the earth to the king._


End file.
